1. Technical Field
In general, the disclosed embodiments relate to devices and methods for the introduction and subsequent evaluation of therapeutic agents to biological tissue, and in particular to the simultaneous introduction of a plurality of agents to the tissue in vivo.
2. Description of the Related Art
Numerous cancer-related therapeutics are under phase I or phase II clinical trial and evaluations at any particular time; however, most of them will fail to advance. In fact, it is estimated that more than 90% of cancer-related therapeutics will fail phase I or II clinical trial evaluation. The failure rate in phase III trials is almost 50%, and the cost of new drug development from discovery through phase III trials is between $0.8 billion and $1.7 billion and can take between eight and ten years.
In addition, many patients fail to respond even to standard drugs that have been shown to be efficacious. For reasons that are not currently well understood or easily evaluated, individual patients may not respond to standard drug therapy. One significant challenge in the field of oncology is to exclude drug selection for individual patients having cell autonomous resistance to a candidate drug to reduce the risk of unnecessary side effects. A related problem is that excessive systemic concentrations are required for many oncology drug candidates in efforts to achieve a desired concentration at a tumor site, an issue compounded by poor drug penetration in many under-vascularized tumors (Tunggal et al., 1999 Clin. Canc. Res. 5:1583).
Clearly there is a need in the art for improved devices and methods for testing and delivering cancer therapies, including improved methodologies for performing efficient pre-clinical and clinical studies of candidate oncology medicines, and for identifying therapeutics having increased likelihood of benefitting individual subjects. The present invention addresses these and similar needs, and offers other related advantages.